Wilson Bilkovich has been a Rubinius contributor since it was first revealed to the public. These days, Wilson works on Rubinius full-time, thanks to Engine Yard, having suspended his career as a freelance Rails developer. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his laptop and heavy metal collection.

David A. Black is a well-known Ruby programmer, trainer, author, speaker, and event organizer. David is one of the founding directors of Ruby Central, Inc., and has been a co-organizer of every RubyConf since the first one in 2001, program co-chair for RailsConf, and program chair for RailsConf Europe. Active in the Ruby world since 2000, David is the author of The Well-Grounded Rubyist (Manning Publications, 2009), a Ruby standard library contributor, and a frequent invited speaker at technical conferences and user groups in the US, Canada, and Europe. He is also the director of Ruby Power and Light, a principal with Arcturo, a Strategic Advisor, Ruby and Rails Training for Cyrus Innovation, and a... Read More.

Michael Bleigh is the Creative Director of Intridea and oversees the design and vision for Intridea’s products. He is an active member of the Southeast Michigan Ruby Users Group and a proponent of unobtrusive behavioral scripting. Michael is an experienced designer and developer in Rails, XHTML, CSS, and Adobe Flex.

Carsten Bormann, Honorarprofessor for Internet technology at the Universität Bremen, is a protocol designer by heart, a standardization geek by necessity, and an author of the first German-language book on AJAX.

I am a Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems. I worked in performance and benchmarking of multi-tier applications for the last 6 years, with special focus on database performance. I currently works in the connected development team at Sun as a database architect and performance engineer.

Fred Cheung is Texperts’ Chief Wizard. A seasoned Mac developer (he’s the author of Speed Download <http://www.yazsoft.com/>), of late he’s turned his attention to web development. He’s submitted several Rails core patches including “faster fixtures” which reduced test suite execution times in Rails 2.0 by up to 50%.

Jonathan has over ten years of commercial experience developing everything from large e-commerce sites to real-time trading applications for Java enabled mobile devices.

Back in 2005 Jonathan left a highly paid job in the City as a technical architect to start Agile Evolved the UK’s first purely Ruby on Rails consultancy. After the merger of Agile Evolved with New Bamboo in early 2007 Jonathan took the job of technical director.
It was during this period that he became increasingly interested in video and so left the company a year later to join Vzaar as the lead architect developing and improving the video architecture of the this popular site.

Rod Cope is the CTO and Founder of OpenLogic, Inc. He has 25 years of software development experience, including 2 years of Rails. He has developed Rails applications, J2EE applications, fat clients, small device code, and nearly everything in between. For the last six years, he has been working on OpenLogic Enterprise, a supported collection of over 350 Open Source projects for enterprise developers. In particular, Rod has used Ruby, Rails, Groovy, JRuby, JBoss, Hibernate, AspectJ, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and many other Open Source projects extensively in commercial applications.

Rod has spoken internationally on both technical and business topics at a wide variety of venues including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, JavaOne, and local user groups. He holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Software... Read More.

Jonathan Dahl is a developer and entrepreneur who started using Ruby on Rails in 2005, as a founding partner at Slantwise Design. He has written gems and plugins and led development on more than a dozen Rails applications, which run the spectrum from Web 2.0 to the enterprise.

Most recently, he has focused on Zencoder, a distributed video transcoding product, and Tumblon, a web-based service for parents to track and share their children’s growth.

Matthew Deiters has extensive software engineering and application delivery experience. He has worked for various industry leaders to build complex enterprise systems including those he created as a consultant with ThoughtWorks. He now enjoys enabling companies and development teams adopt agile development practices and leverage lightweight platforms.

Stuart is a digital industry veteran and the Technical Director of the London based social media agency Made By Many. He has been living the dream on Rails for nearly 3 years and is the author of LiveRail as well as a number of tutorials and the RailsDAV plugin.

Pradeep is the Director of R&D for Intridea, Inc, where he helps build SocialSpring, a modular enterprise social-networking platform. A former computational scientist, Pradeep was writing sophisticated astrophysical simulations in Ruby well before the language became fashionable. Since then, he has been working with and thinking a lot about social networks, machine learning and applying mathematical models to social data.

Thomas Enebo has been a practitioner of Java for over a decade and he is the co-lead of the JRuby project. Thomas has also been happily using Ruby since 2001. In addition to working on JRuby, Tom is interested in improving the state of alternative languages on the Java Virtual Machine. Tom is employed working on JRuby full time at Engine Yard.

Jay Fields is a software developer, speaker, and author employed by DRW Trading. He has a passion for discovering and maturing innovative solutions. His most recent work has been in the Domain Specific Language space where he has delivered applications that empowered subject matter experts to write the business rules of the applications. He is also very interested in maturing software design through software testing and software testing in general.

Neal Ford is a senior application architect at *Thought*Works, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, author of 3 books, including Art of Java Web Development (Manning 2003), and editor/contributor for the 2006 and 2007 editions of the No Fluff, Just Stuff Anthology (Pragmatic Press). He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at numerous developers’ conferences worldwide. Check out his web site at www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

I used to be a process consultant working with XP and Agile. I was the third independent signatory on the Agile Manifesto. I’m now working primarily with Ruby, with a bit of Agile on the side.

Agile-wise, I’ve worked for ObjectMentor, ThoughtWorks and eXoftware and with clients like Coca-Cola, JPMorgan, Egg and AOL. Ruby-wise, I’m working with EdgeCase and FiveRuns.

I’m proud Ruby/Rails contributor by way of three small patches for Rails and one for RubyGems, I spoke on XP and Rails at RailsConf2007 and co-organised the Scotland On Rails conference in 2008 and 2009.

Markus Franz is Director at Sugoma KG in Jena. Sugoma provides several products and services based on open source technologies. Prior, Franz was Chief Technology Officer at BF Blogform Search GmbH in Berlin.

Tammo Freese is an Extreme Programmer from Germany.
As a freelance consultant and software engineer,
he supports Rails teams to achieve more with less code.
In his spare time, he researches refactoring-aware
version control for Java.

Arun Gupta is a Technology Evangelist for Web Services and Web 2.0 Applications at Sun Microsystems. He was the specification lead for several APIs in the Java platform, committer in multiple Open Source projects, represented Sun at different standard bodies and contributed to Java EE and SE releases.

Dr. Stefan Kaes has been involved in Rails core development since early 2005.

He’s running a blog focused on Rails performance, has contributed more than 40 patches to Rails core and developed several Rails plugins, available from RailsExpress.

He’s the author of railsbench, a development tool for performance measurement of Rails applications.

He’s currently working as a Rails consultant for AutoScout24. In addition, he’s started work on a Rails book for Addison Wesley, focusing on writing efficient Rails applications. The first finished chapter is available as a “shortcut” on informIT.

Yehuda Katz is a core team member on the DataMapper project, and the creator of the DO.rb project. He is a contributor to the Merb and Rubinius projects, and is a contributing author for the upcoming Manning Publications book Ruby in Practice. He recently accepted a job at EngineYard. He has been working on Ruby on Rails applications since 2005, and has just spent a year working on a very large and complex data-driven Rails app (http://procore.com).

He also does front-end web work, is a coauthor of the Manning book jQuery in Action and a core team member of the jQuery project.

rany keddo is a rails hacker at the german mini-startup play/type. he’s working on the rather good event platform boomloop.com. he’s been a full time rails lover since early 2006, when he built one of the first rails applications at a bank.

Jeremy Kemper (bitsweat) is a programmer at 37signals hailing from Pasadena, California. Hot on the heels of DHH, he has been the most active contributor to Rails. He’s knee deep in pretty much all aspects of the framework and one of the top batters against new, incoming tickets.

Michael “Koz” Koziarski is a software consultant specialising in Ruby on Rails, database architecture, web based businesses and object oriented design. He’s been a contributor to Rails since 2004, a Rails Core Team member since 2005 and helps other programmers improve their code on The Rails Way, a popular Rails architecture weblog.

Jarkko Laine is one of the earliest Rails evangelists in Europe, with more than two years of experience in teaching and giving talks about Rails. He wrote Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional together with Christian Hellsten and is the founder of the Finnish Rails user community. He currently works as a senior developer for dotherightthing.com, a site for rating and discussing the social performance of world’s businesses, and writes a new ebook on accessible Ajax on Rails for Peepcode. In his freetime, Jarkko runs through forests like a gnu and writes about anything he finds interesting on his weblog at jlaine.net.

There are always two hearts beating inside Christian: He loves typography and sketching as well as system engineering and computer science. He holds a master’s degree in system-design and also graduated as a technology-and-innovation-manager from the University of Kassel, Germany. As a lecturer in the field of mobile application design he worked with postgraduate students at the Zurich University of Art, Switzerland. As an entrepreneur and co-founder of a successful design and consulting company he worked on bringing the user-centered-design focus into a technology-driven mobile telecommunications industry in the early days of mobile business. These days he bridges the gap between design and development as the founder of codedifferent by creating mobile and web innovations in interdisciplinary teams with the help of Ruby on... Read More.

Alex MacCaw is a software developer for Made by Many, a London based social media consultancy. He’s mainly involved with Rails prototyping, but delves into lots of areas concerning application design and implementation.

Eleanor trained as a physicist and information scientist. For a number of years she specialised in developing real-time software systems for the aviation and broadcast transmission industries until a long-standing love affair with Ruby drew her inexorably into the world of web development.

Her interests include system architecture, next-generation semantic networking, creative abuses of Ruby, and reinventing the wheel.

Mike built his first open source application in 1995 using C and Win32. He’s a member of the Apache Project and recently starting working with Ruby and Rails professionally after a decade in the J2EE world. He has a Masters in Computer Science and races his motorcycle in his spare time.

Martin has been working in the web development industry for over ten years enabling a wide spectrum of organizations to meet their online goals – from Bluechips and public sector bodies to independents and start-ups. At DSC, Martin created the Working With Rails community site that helps Rails developers connect with one another and find out who is doing what with Rails. He is currently working at CitySafe in London developing mission critical apps in use daily by the Police, Government, and high profile financial and retail institution.

Ben Scofield is a senior developer at Viget Labs, where he builds Rails applications for Web 2.0 startups. He’s been using Ruby and Rails for over three years, and is active in the community, speaking at the past two Railsconfs, and Rails to Italy and Rubyconf in 2007. In his rare downtime, he spends time with his family (recently increased!), works on personal projects, and tries to make the world a better place for web developers everywhere.

Chris Selmer is Director of Extreme Product Development at Intridea, Inc, where he leads small development teams on fast-paced Ruby on Rails projects. He is an active member of the Rails community and helps run the Washington DC Ruby User Group.

Nick Sieger is a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems where he has been
working on a team building Project Kenai (http://kenai.com/), a large
JRuby on Rails application. He is a member of the JRuby core team,
leading the effort to improve Rails deployment on the Java Virtual
Machine. He created and co-maintains the JDBC adapter for ActiveRecord
that JRuby on Rails uses for database connectivity, as well as the
Warbler tool and JRuby-Rack library for dealing with Java application
server deployment. He maintains a blog on Ruby and JRuby-related
topics at http://blog.nicksieger.com/.

Romek is a professional cryptographer and owner of independent recording label Spiky Black Cat Records. His interests include UK ENUM, Hybrid Key Infrastructures and improving the security of internet traffic.

Roderick is an all-rounder: COO at Nedforce, academic in Business & IT, and Rails contributor since 2005. He is the supplier of MySQL and PostgreSQL database drivers for Windows and ActiveRecord patches to the Rails core. In 2006 he took the initiative to have Nedforce deliver Rails solutions worldwide, earning it clients as far away as Australia and Japan.

T.J. VanSlyke has led two of ELC Technologies’ six-week rapid-launch projects to their successful completion. In 2007, he published a paper on data structure visualization in Java, and would love to hear your ideas about creating a similar solution for Ruby. His main points of interest are metaprogramming, aspect-oriented software, visual programming, and project management.

Till Vollmer has written several articles about Ruby on Rails with Ajax in German magazines and he was a speaker on the 2006 European Rails Conference (about Localisation). He is one of Codemart’s co-founders and is responsible for the company’s technology and development. Codemart has launched MindMeister a Rails based mind mapping tool in February 2007. Before setting up Codemart in late 2005, he worked for nine years for the Austrian software company, Hyperwave. In his capacity as Presales Director CER, Till successfully managed the presales team at Hyperwave’s headquarters in Munich from September 2004 to the end of 2005. Prior to this, Till gained valuable marketing and further development experience in the field of collaborative enterprise management solutions, acting as Product Marketing Director... Read More.

Ingo Weiss is lead developer at Metaversum(twinity.com) in Berlin, Germany. Before that, he designed and built web applications and interactive educational experiences at WGBH, Catapult Thinking, and as a consultant in Boston, USA. He also taught Interaction design and Rails application development, among other classes, at Northeastern University.

Jonathan Weiss is a Ruby consultant and partner at Peritor Wissensmanagement GmbH in Berlin, Germany. For the last years he has been developing and consulting large Ruby on Rails projects where he focused on Scalability and Security. He is an active member of the Ruby and Rails community and is the developer of the Open Source deployment tool Webistrano. In his spare time he maintains Rubygems and Rails in the FreeBSD Ports system.

Ian began in the early 90s with Smalltalk-80 and life was good. He then had to write lots of things in C in a big company, and decided to to philosophy for a while. Returning to computers to earn some money, he tried writing web apps in php, which was no fun. Since using Rails, and ruby (which is almost as much fun as smalltalk), life is good again.

Matt Wood heads up software development at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he is responsible for the software that drives the Institute’s world class sequencing facility and putting that biological data to work to further our knowledge of health and disease.